President Barack Obama bowed to reality when he made further tweaks to his signature law, the Affordable Care Act.

It was an overdue admission from Obama that Obama-care, as it is also known, is failing. Millions of people have had their individual health insurance policies canceled.

The administration declared the Obama-care website functional on Monday, but there are still problems after its Oct. 1 debut.

The question now is if the ACA can be salvaged. "This isn't just about a broken website, it's about a fundamentally flawed law," said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner.

But salvaging the law may require more congressional approval — not another dubious presidential edict.

Obama has gotten quite good at tweaking his signature law. But his latest tweak has already raised questions about what authority the president has to change the law without Congress.

Obama said he would allow many of the individual health insurance policies — previously deemed “substandard” by new Obama-care guidelines — to stay in effect for another year.

Another concern is how the private insurers will react. Are they really going to resurrect individual health insurance policies they plan to cancel, so they can then cancel them a year from now?

And are those policies even legal, even after the president’s proclamation?

The ACA passed Congress in 2010 and received the president’s signature. Congress needs to be involved in altering its provisions.

President Obama has done everything he can to avoid that path. Congress is half-controlled by the Democrats, who have a majority in the U.S. Senate, and the Republicans, who control the House of Representatives. The GOP has voted to repeal Obama-care dozens of times.

Obama did tweak the law by giving waivers and extensions to employers, unions and more. But he avoided anything that would get at the law’s heart — the individual mandate. Forcing people to have health insurance, through a tax, was a back-door attempt to do what has never been done before — to force national health care coverage.

But it was easier to pass the law than to implement it. The health insurance mandate has somehow canceled serviceable, individual insurance policies for millions of Americans — which they were explicitly promised they could keep.

Obama realizes how bad it all looks and sought to mitigate the political damage.

But the president needs to worry more about the structure and integrity of the law and its administration.

If Obama doesn’t go to Congress for help, Obama-care may collapse and cause further nationwide damage.

Portions of this editorial appeared first in the Daytona Beach News Journal, a Halifax Media Group newspaper in Florida.